User talk:Herbee

There is really no reason to capitalize the name of the gamma function—it's a function like the sine or the logarithm, none of which are capitalized. The fact that TeX \Gamma and HTML Γ need a capital G is not relevant.

—Herbee 15:02, 2004 Mar 3 (UTC)

The needs of TeX and html are not the reason why people capitalize it. The reason is that the capital Greek letter Γ is used. Are there really people who learned TeX and html before learning the Greek alphabet? I suppose nowadays there probably are, but it seems bizarre. Michael Hardy 19:49, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest, Michael. It's always nice to know that one's work is actually being read.

First of all, as a fellow mathematician (albeit an amateur) I understand perfectly well why anyone would apply the name Gamma to the symbol Γ, and I'm not unsympathetic to the sentiment. However, I also happen to appreciate literary traditions, which certainly don't support it. I guess it's a mathematics/computer science/nerdy thing to do. Thus, once again, it's a TeX and HTML peculiarity to write Gamma to get the Γ symbol. There's no need to contaminate encyclopedic text with that practice.

If I read you correctly, you are claiming a link between (the capitalization of) the name of a concept and the symbol used to represent it. I deny that such a link exists. Counterexamples abound: SI units (joule vs J, ohm vs Ω, etc.), a river delta (not a Delta for Δ), chemical elements (hydrogen vs H etc.) etc. Would you write Hydrogen just because its chemical symbol is a capital H?

Wikipedia actually mixed "Gamma function" and "gamma function" about equally, and after deciding to make the spelling consistent, I has to choose one or the other. Lower-case gamma looked more natural to me. MathWorld backs me up in this.

—Herbee 22:53, 2004 Mar 3 (UTC)

If you go to Hypoteneuse, and click on "What links here", some "C" pages still link to it. (Perhaps in other languages? I don't quite understand what's going on.) I'd delete it for you, but not as long as some pages link to it. Noel 12:57, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi Noel, thanks for your quick reaction. I was expecting a week-long voting period. Should I have put the vfd on the [deletions] page?

Those three links are all "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C", so it must mean the English article C. But the current English C article doesn't link to hypoteneuse; I checked. Could it be some kind of database corruption, especially since there are three of the same bogus links?

The links to hypoteneuse are new, by the way. They weren't there before. I think that deletion would be safe; there cannot be anything useful there.

—Herbee 13:36, 2004 Mar 6 (UTC)

No, you did the right thing by puttin it on RfD - it is a redirect, after all. (I personally don't bother to wait a week for redirects which are genuine mis-spellings, on the grounds that there are an infinite number of mis-spellings and I don't see the point of keeping just the ones that happen to get created by accident.)

I don't understand what's going on any better than you. I'll put our notes in RfD. Noel 13:54, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You misunderstand. I never proposed putting the title word in italics generally. It is better to begin by saying "A dog is an animal" than by writing about the word dog, saying, for example "Dog is a term used in the English language to refer to ..." etc. But on those occasions on which one writes about a word, rather than using the word to refer to whatever it refers to, one should italicize it. That does not mean it should be in bold face; that should occur only if some other reason so indicates. And I'm pretty sure that that is a Wikipedia convention, although I can't cite the page at this moment. Michael Hardy 00:08, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK, I get it now. I agree. Ciao, Herbee 00:51, 2004 Mar 7 (UTC)

Hi Herbee. Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements where mav and I have both replied to you. Do you happen to know of a data source for exact molar volumes of specific gases (rather than the molar vol of an ideal gas)? All I can find through Google is an endless slew of High School chem assignments ... Bth 08:37, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi Herbee, I can as well reply to your posting here. It's a pity to hear that you back off. I appreciated your contributions as very constructive and eaven respectful. Do we also have lost [[User:Bth|Bth] on the way, who also seemed to be very constructive? To end in my poorest English: CU! —SteffenB 15:56, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)